List of Ship abbreviations

[longvin]

I checked the manual and it doesn't cover the various ship abbreviations and what ship classes replace what. Can we get a list of those here?

B - Pre dreadnought battleship. Replaced by the BB.

BB - Dreadnought Battleship

BC - Battlecruiser. Does this replace the CA? As, I know when I do autodesign after a I certain year it keeps changing CA to BC

CA - Heavy Cruiser. Does this get replaced by the BC?

CL - Light Cruiser

AMC -

DD - Destroyer

MS - Minesweeper

TR -

AV -

LT - ?

XX - ?

Questions I have: Which one are these are the torpedo boats? As I keep getting missions to build torpedo boats.

Which one of these is the minelayer?

[trenton59]

AMC- Armed merchant cruiser

TR- Transport

AV- Seaplane Tender

LT- Land Target

Edit:
I think that all ships can be fit with mines when you have the tech.

Torpedo boats are handled as destroyers.

[longvin]

Thanks!

and as far as I can tell you can't build TRs, AVs, or LTs?

[sage2]

What is the roll of the "AMC" ships? Are they like 'budget' cruisers? The enemy seems to use them as commerce raiders, but my light cruisers chew them up pretty quick.

[ccip]

AMCs, as the manual mentions, are Auxiliary Merchant Cruisers, basically civilian ships built partly for/reassigned to wartime duty. They can only be built and operated during wartime, but take just 4 turns/months to construct. They're meant for raiding in relatively safe/distant waters. You can build them fast enough to escape cruisers, actually (although at some extra cost) and you want to build them with Long/Extreme range as much as possible so you can just keep them in distant waters, away from enemy forces. When the war ends, your AMCs are immediately sold off - you can't keep them during peacetime.

[ccip]

And yes, torpedo boats and destroyers are basically the same thing, it's a terminology issue - in fact, the name destroyer originally came from "torpedo boat destroyer", which were basically big tough torpedo boats meant to kill enemy light torpedo boats. Most DDs that you start with early in the game are more properly called torpedo boats, because that's what they are (they don't have the teeth to kill enemy TBs/DDs).

Battlecruisers and BBs don't "replace" the old Bs and CAs, it's just that the state of the art shifts enough that your suggested designs will revert to BB and BC because that's what the game thinks the best option is. You can still build Bs and CAs at any point in the game, it's just that you might not always want to.

Minelayers can be any ship with mines, but you need to have mine rails researched as a technology first. Once they are, you can build or rebuild DDs, CLs and MSs (and AMCs too I think, though I haven't tried that yet) to carry mines depending on their tonnage - it's basically up to 10 mines per 1000 tons displacement. One good way to make minelayers is to rebuild some old CLs to carry mines.

[galagagalaxian]

Have you experimented with minelayers? Do you find them worthwhile?